Wednesday, December 31, 2014

People in Japan are so averse to romantic relationships that the country's media even has a name for it: sekkusu shinai shokogun, or "celibacy syndrome," according to a widely circulated Guardian story on the country's low rates of marriage, childbearing and even sex.

But this is more than a story about Japan and its cultural quirks: It's a story about the global economy. Japan is the world's third-largest economy, a crucial link in global trade and a significant factor everyone else's economic well-being. It owns almost as much U.S. debt as does China. It's a top trading partner of the U.S., China and lots of other countries. The Japanese economy is in serious enough trouble that it could set the rest of us back. And the biggest source of that trouble is demographic: Japanese people aren't having enough kids to sustain a healthy economy. One big reason they're having fewer kids is that they're not as interested in dating or marrying one another, in part because they're less interested in sex.

Here are a few of the statistics, some from the Guardian story and others from a 2011 report by Japan's population center:

• Extremely high numbers of Japanese do not find sex appealing. 45 percent of women and 25 percent of men, ages 16 to 24, are "not interested in or despised sexual contact."

• More than half of Japanese are single. 49 percent of unmarried women and 61 of unmarried men, ages 18 to 34, are not in any kind of romantic relationship.

• In every age group, the percentage of Japanese men and women who are not in a romantic relationship has been increasing steadily since the 1990s.

• About a quarter of Japanese don't want a romantic relationship. 23 percent of women and 27 percent of men say they are not interested in any kind of romantic relationship.

• More than a third of childbearing-age Japanese have never had sex: 39 percent of women and 36 percent of men, ages 18 to 34. That number hasn't actually changed much over the last decade, but it is unusually high.

• The Japanese population institute projects that women in their early 20s have a 25 percent chance of never marrying and a 40 percent chance of never having kids.

These trends are not new. Since 2006, Japanese women have complained of soshoku danshi or "herbivore men," so called for their lack of interest in the opposite sex. There's an entire industry in Japan that helps men who eschew romantic lives cope with loneliness through relationship-simulating video games and even holiday retreats. See Chico Harlan's great 2010 piece on this.

Japanese women, for their part, often avoid romantic relationships because Japanese laws and social norms can make it extremely difficult for women to have both a family and a career. Japan is extremely unusual in that it is highly educated and wealthy but still has some of the worst systemic gender inequality in the world; it has a European-style economy but South Asian social family mores. Professional women are stuck in the middle of that contradiction. It's not just that day-care programs are scarce: Women who become pregnant or even just marry are so expected to quit work that they can come under enormous social pressure to do so and often find that career advancement becomes impossible. There's a word for married working women: oniyome, or "devil wives."

Because they're forced to choose, inevitably lots of women who might otherwise have a family and a job are only seeking the latter. That sense of pessimism about marriage appears to be partially driving the lack of interest in romantic relationships, and thus in sex. This chart shows common reasons expressed for staying single, by Japanese men and women ages 25 to 34. The shaded bars represent the subsequent national surveys, from 1987 through 2011:

Saturday, December 27, 2014

Sometimes I get one of those eerie, Jungian synchronicities that make me go "hmm." The last time I got one, I was thinking about the mythological Greek god(dess) Ares and Athena. Ares, the cowardly, incompetent and blood-thirsty god of war, was hated by all the other gods (including his parents), but he was especially despised by Athena, the goddess of wisdom and civilization. Yet, they were both gods of technology. They overlapped in it.

I concluded that the myth was about how war and civilization were opposed to each other, and how, contrary to its supporters, there is no wisdom in war. Otherwise Ares would be the god of wisdom, not Athena.

Their overlapping as technology gods was due to the fact that technology is amoral; it's neither good nor bad. It can be used for either, for war or peace, for destruction or creation. As Cooper's Law ("All machines are amplifiers") informs us, technology (machines) do nothing more than amplify our natural abilities. What we use technology for is up to us.

And contrary to all the Earth-Firsters and other eco-weenies, technology is here to stay. It's not going away, ever. It'll only advance, as it always has.

The "hmm" occurred when I read Neal Stephenson's massive but absorbing novel, Cryptonomicon. I found he has several pages of discussion about Ares and Athena. I even remember where it started: page 800. (That's right: page 800. The novel is almost 1,000 pages long.)

It turns out he and I have come to essentially the same conclusions.

Stephenson believes, as I do, that ancient myths embody great, universal truths. They would not have lasted if they didn't. They just need to be updated for the modern mind. It's doesn't make any sense these days to say that Athena is the goddess of weaving. It makes a great deal of sense to say she's the goddess of technology. Weaving is just a primitive form of technology.

Here's where we badly need some mythic updating. In the past, Ares was just the god of war. Today, if we apply some libertarian theory about the difference between the State and Society, he becomes much more than a mere serial killer: he's now the god of the State. All States, being based on coercion and the threat of violence, are always about war. Indeed, they are always at war, because no matter what it gets involved in, no matter what its good intentions, it will only create conflict.

Just look at the "war on drugs," which has increased crime, or the "war on poverty," which has increased broken families, or the "war on terror," which has increased hatred against the US. The State is Ares. And being Ares, he is a bungler, as all States are bunglers.

Athena, being the goddess of civilization, is now the mythic goddess of Society. Since the State is based on the Political Means and Society on the Economic Means, they are always opposed to each other, and always will be. Applied libertarian theory backs up the Greek story of Ares and Athena being enemies. Of course she despised him, just as people knowledgeable enough despise the State because they know its unalterable nature is to always war on Society, to attempt to absorb--and therefore terribly damage--it.

Athena is armed with a sword and a shield, named Aegis. The shield is the important thing: it had the head of the Gorgon depicted on the front of it, which turned to stone anyone who looked upon it. Her shield, which was created by technology, is both an offensive and defensive weapon. Against what? Apply libertarian theory again. Her shield is for offense and defense against the State. Against Ares.

The point of the myth of Athena is that Society must always have defensive and offensive weapons against the State! It can be no other way. The Founding Fathers understood this, when they created the Bill of Rights, especially the Second Amendment, which has two purposes--as a defense against the little criminals known as people, but mostly as a check on the big criminal known as the State.

Unfortunately the Bill of Rights is just a piece of paper. The State interprets it. That's why, today, a little after 200 years of its existence, it is mostly dead. A piece of paper isn't much of a shield. And without firearms, the citizens don't have much of a sword.

In the original myth Ares had various weapons--but none were named. It didn't matter, because naming his weapons was irrelevant. Today, since Ares is the god of the State, he does have at least one weapon with a name.

That weapon is the State itself. Today, Ares cowardly hides behind the State, and uses advanced technology to attack and destroy Societies on the other side of the world. George Bush, who claims he is a Christian, is actually an Ares worshiper. So are Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Max Boot, David Frum, William Kristol and Rush Limbaugh.

The parallels in the Christian tradition (of which Greek myths are a part) tell us that although Societies may not necessarily worship God, all States, in varying degrees, do worship Satan. All States, of course, claim God is on their side, and supports their murder, lies, theft and destruction. Thus, anyone who believes in the goodness of the State cannot tell the difference between God and the Devil.

In my opinion, Ares has evolved--or de-evolved--into the archetype of the Chickenhawk--part Ares, part Satan, part Trickster. I also refer to this archetype as "the Frum," for mostly obvious reasons. One which isn't obvious is that the name has a nice repulsive sound to it, like "Gollum."

One of the reasons--possibly the main one--the Chickenhawk today can be the Chickenhawk is because advanced technology allows it. In the past, leaders were often on the battlefield. Today, never. Instead, they can sit on one side of the planet and murder people on the other side with a push of a button. Such is the misuse of technology by the cowardly modern-day followers of Ares.

Can the archetype of the Chickenhawk get any worse than it is now? Sure. If Chickenhawks, who are fascists, had their way, they'd Borgify the entire society. Conscription--slavery--might be the first thing they'd do.

Being part Ares, the Chickenhawks love war. Being part Satan, they lust after the power to rule. Being part Trickster, they'll tell every lie possible to advance their agenda. But being Chickenhawks, they want others to fight the wars.

Since Ares and Athena are always at odds, the State is continually trying to disarm Society. Gun control, for example, is an attempt to remove the technology Society uses to protect itself against criminals, whether they are of the State or outside it. It's Ares saying Athena must give up her sword and shield, and be at his mercy. Only a fool would fall for it.

It is Society, the free market and liberty, that creates advanced technology. Yet foolish people voluntarily give it to Ares, because he has tricked them into thinking he is one of the good guys. Those who understand the wisdom of Athena know differently.

These days, for the Chickenhawk, the State is the shield and the advanced technology of the military is the sword. These scoundrels hide behind the shield, wrapping themselves in the flag, claiming the State and Society are the same thing, that they represent it, and those who disagree with them are unpatriotic, indeed traitors. They use the sword to attack other Societies around the world.

What is the defensive/offensive shield that modern-day Athena has against Ares? Remember that since Ares and Athena overlap as technology gods, Ares can and will use the technology that Athena creates. But, for every threat by the State, there will be a defense by Society.

Some of the ones today are computers, software and cryptography. The Internet can be described as an anarchistic community, one in which information can go around the world in a second. The State, of course, wants to control it--to tax it, and to shut parts of it down.

It certainly wants to control cryptography, because of encryption. For all practical purposes modern-day encryption is unbreakable. People who use encryption are safe from the prying eyes of the State.

Another is microtechnology. Given its way, Ares would microchip every person in the US. Athena will find a way around that, too. Or, if people resist implantation, which will probably be too much even for the sheeple because of its "Number of the Beast" implications, there's the possibility of a driver's license with a magnetic strip on it, containing a plethora of information about the possessor. Or it being connected to a national database that says if you don't pay a $7 parking ticket in a state 1000 miles away your license will be suspended.

Fortunately, Society will attempt to find a way around these things. Athena, like Ares, must be part Trickster in dealing with him. It's an unending battle and probably always will be.

Stephenson believes the coming battlefields between Ares and Athena are "bio-, micro- and nanotechnology." These technologies, amplifiers of our of abilities, will be used by States, by Ares, for war, to control the free market, and to strip people of their freedoms.

Of course, the rationale will be that it is in the name of "security" and "safety." This is nonsense. As Chief Wiggum of The Simpsons once said, "I didn't say the government couldn't harm you. I said it couldn't help you."

Stephenson is right about those three battlefields, but there is more.

The battlefield has always, ultimately, been about ideas. That's the main battle between Ares and Athena. It always has been. "Ideas have consequences, " wrote Richard Weaver in his book of the same title. "He who works with the head, rules; he who works with the hands, is ruled," the old saying tells us.

Ares will attempt to appropriate everything for his use--technology, economics, philosophy, political science, religion. He will tell the citizens it will be for their own good. Considering States, in the 20th century, killed up to 200 million people, no one should believe this.

Unfortunately, there will never be a shortage of deluded court intellectuals working for Ares.

The wisdom of Athena tells us that Society must use technology, and intelligence, and the same ideas about economics, philosophy, political science and religion to oppose Ares and protect Society from his depredations.

The future is impossible to tell, as are advances in technology. But I do know the advances in technology by Society, whatever they are, will be used by Ares to attack and control Society. They must be countered by Society, by Athenan wisdom.

Stephenson makes the disturbing point that many people today have essentially become illiterate, that they have returned to an oral culture, one in which TV is predominant. Many believe its foolish myths. Apparently many people can no longer truly think. What they read goes in one ear and out the other. I blame this on the State schools. Ares has taken control of them, too. That makes it easier to brainwash the populace.

A working brain, one that understands the nature of the State, and the evil it always attempts, and how to fight against it, is the most important thing. It is the ultimate sword, and the ultimate shield.

Friday, December 26, 2014

The characters: Ivana Gonadsoff, an Innocent Man, Various Implements of Torture..

Ivana: So, traitor to the People and the Revolution, you claim the Bolsheviks were ten times as bad as the Nazis?

Innocent Man: Look at the facts, you perverted Commie carpet-muncher.

Electrical Generator: BZZZZTT!!!

Man: Yow! And you’re ugly, too!

Ivana: How do you testicles feel after I just fried them with this generator?

Man: You sure do seem to be awfully interested in testicles.

Ivana: You might want to pay more attention to my last name.

Man: You can torture me all you want, even kill me, but you can’t change the facts: the Communists were ten times as bad as the Nazis.

Ivana: So what? We have all kinds of willing liberal dupes in the West who’ve got Cranial-Rectal Inversion so bad they can’t see the truth until they end up in the Gulag. There is no one so blind as someone who just refuses to see.

Man: You would have never won World War II if the West hadn’t helped you.

Ivana: You mean the Great Patriotic War? Thank you, you dumbasses! You let atheistic Bolshevists take over Christian Eastern Europe for 50 years!

Man: The winner always writes the history.

Ivana: The South knows all about that, don’t they? Even though they were in the right, the North still won. Might makes right!

Man: In the long run you’ll lose.

Ivana: Don’t be too sure about that. The default position of the human race is fascism and Communism. The few who have everything and everyone else who has almost nothing. I can live with it, as long as I rule. And I rule you.

Man: Only my body, never my soul.

Ivana: Who cares? We’ll raise children to worship the State. It’s called daycare and public school.

"The idea that man is essentially a product of his environment is an almost essential part of the folklore of Western half-education." - Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

That would be Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Leftism Revisited. I have one of the original copies, and until it was reprinted what copies were available cost $80.

It is a truly profound work, and is EvKL's magnun opus. I can't tell you how much it has influenced me.

The late William F. Buckley wrote the introduction to it, and said it was "like going to graduate school again."

Where to start?

EvKL said leftism is about "the overthrow of the Father," and he's right. It's not just "feminism" that wants to overthrow the Father, but all leftists.

Just as bad, they think people are purely products of their environment, so they want to destroy society, since in their delusions they think they can rebuild it from the ground up and make people into gods. And they always try it through the deaths of millions and the destruction of everything.

He claimed the Nazis were overwhelming leftist, and once you read the book he realize he's right.

And who does he believe is the founder of modern-day leftism? The Marquis de Sade. And he makes a very good case for it, too.

Sade, who believed people were no better than insects, was a materialist atheist. All those things go together, even today, with "leftist libertarians," who are not libertarians but just plain leftists, and just as dangerous.

EvKL believed in natural hierarchies, he believed in religion and realized its destruction would lead to genocide, and he did not believe in equality, because to be equal you have to be identical, the way two dimes or nickels are identical. And that can be done only through force - through death and destruction.

And he certainly did not believe in democracy, which he considered a horror. He also considered it "antique." And that is was based on envy.

What he believed in, instead, was mature constitutional monarchies.

I'll stop here, since I could go on for a long time. All I can add is this: buy the book. I guarantee that you will not be disappointed.

“The farmer was and remains the stumbling block to socialist experiments everywhere. Since he raises his own food and tends to live in his own house, he is less 'controllable' than say, the urban dweller.” - Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Michael Brown got what he deserved. Eric Garner did not. How could the police not know a man that fat and old would have health problems? They didn't think it through. They not supposed to. They're supposed to follow orders. They didn't have a thought in their heads. What sort of brain-dead cops throw a man down for selling loose cigarettes? Aren't there any real crimes around?

Garner was not killed by evil cops. He was killed by cops following orders. It's a way of avoiding responsibility. The Nazis used that excuse at Nuremberg - and got hanged anyway.

Cops have been shooting dogs and murdering people for a long time. I knew that revenge was coming, and that's what we got with those two dead cops in New York. Now the order has come down in New York to "avoid unnecessary arrests." Oh really? It's about time.

When people are oppressed and humiliated enough, revenge always follows. Oppression always leads to resentment and revenge.

The clip above is from one of my favorite movies - The President's Analyst. Arte Johnson plays an assassin working for the feds - the government. He uses the excuse of every bureaucrat - "Rules are rules!"

The government has a monopoly of force. That's a bad thing. It's always gets out of control. Those who use force, unfortunately, always think they are doing good things.

I've thought for years the way to deal with these problems is to fire 90% of the police and arm all the citizens. You'd be amazed at the change that would happen - and all of them would be for the better.

Monday, December 22, 2014

Some years ago I had reason to visit a man's house and found he made his living by having a complete machine shop in his detached garage. He must have had $100,000 worth of equipment in it. I sometimes wondered what exactly he could make.

I used to read a lot of science-fiction as a teen and found some of the stories dealt with what was called a Universal Assembly Machine - a machine that can make any machine. In Star Trek they were called Replicators. (Let's face it - we know what the Holodeck would really be used for).

Now I wonder about 3-D printing. The inventor, if I remember correctly, said people would use them to make fucktoys, but his opinion is irrelevant, since people throughout history have said, "there is no use for this." The inventions included phones, cars, computers, cell phones...and nearly everything else.

If 3-D printing is what I think it is, economics will have to be rethought. Goodby economies of scale. Good-bye shipping jobs to China. Good-bye huge factories. Hello tiny "factories" in garages and hello dozens of car manufacturers, the way is used to be (REO Speedwagon was originally the name of a car).

Absolute advantage will still exist but comparative advantage never did.

Of course, only time will tell, but I'm looking forward to the 3-D printing of organs. Houses? Cars? For a fraction of what it now costs?

Friday, December 19, 2014

Some years ago I was in a Walgreen's in a mostly black area when I saw a middle-aged black woman heading straight for me. I thought, "She's targeting me because I'm white, but why?"

Turned out her ancient SUV wouldn't start, so ask the Magic Caucasian Man to do his White Man Voodoo and fix it!

Turned out she was parked on an incline, couldn't even turn her key, and I immediately diagnosed torque lock. I bounced her car back-and-forth until it started, then advised her to take it to the shop and have the problem taken care of.

This isn't the first time this has happened to me - white women, Asian women, black women.

The whole world looks to the white man to fix everything. Kipling called it the White Man's Burden, so it's nothing new.

Yet there is a downside to the much of the world seeing the White Man as some sort of magician. Envy, as I've written about before. Which is why we see all these attacks on Dead White Male Slave-Owners, blah, blah, blah, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Perversely, those who are benefited are rarely grateful. This has been noticed and written about for a long time. Kant wrote about it. Kierkegaard wrote about it. Schopenhauer wrote about it.

They claimed it was because many people can't stand admitting someone is superior enough to them to give them things. They can't be grateful for it. Instead they've envious. Biting the hand that feeds them, you know.

There is no cure for any of this, just amelioration. For one thing, there should be no welfare for foreign counties. We're just making enemies out of them. In their envy they want to bring us down, even if they bring themselves down.

And we don't need to let such people in the U.S. We're cutting our own throats.

I'd settle for those two things. Because, ultimately, the envious want to kill you. Honestly, do you want to be swarmed with Morlocks?

Thursday, December 18, 2014

When I was in college I worked for about six months as a security guard. One time the company had me stand for a street corner for four hours during a football game and keep my eye on things.

To pass the time I decided to judge the women walking by: "Would?" or "Would not?"

It was an eye-opening experience. I don't know how many women walked by. To make things simple, let's say 100. Of those women, I got five "woulds." That means 95% of the women were not acceptable.

I also noticed something else. Many of the middle-aged women looked as if they might have been cute as teenagers. As the years went by I noticed that many women reached their peak as teens and by 35 they were unrecognizable.

I have also found that even for very-good-looking women after age 27 their prospects aren't that great anymore.

When I got off work as a guard the next day I pulled out my senior yearbook and went through the senior class girls. 56 yes and 157 no - roughly three-fourths "no.". I never went through though the rest of the girls because I figured it would be the same.

And that it why I have a hard time taking so many of the concepts in the Manosphere seriously. It acts as if all women have the upper hand when younger, with their "hypergamy" and 20% of the "Alphas" getting all the women, and "Alpha Fux and Beta Bux," and all the rest of those adolescent delusions.

And this includes the 80% of women who aren't attractive? And all those overweight landwhales are going to be part of some "Alpha's" harem, because they hate "Betas"?

Give me a break. The vast majority of women cannot play those games, not with the way they look and act. Modern-day complaints against women are now legendary - overweight, hostile, blaming all their problems on men. Yet these same repulsive women can apparently play these "Alpha/Beta," "hypergamy" games? Which they cannot - and proof of that is marriage rates are hovering at 50%.

When it comes down to it, I take my experience over some unpopular, womanless guy spouting nonsense about What Women Are Really Like.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

I will add, as I've written before, that women's greatest flaw just might be envy. On some level they must realize men invented everything in the world and that they are 100% dependent on men. Because without men and what they have invented...women have almost nothing. And the envious want to destroy, even if they destroy them themselves.

The envious are never grateful.

“Who run the world?” asks Beyoncé in her recent hit song, before answering unequivocally: “Girls.” Her record was the first many had heard of this change of leadership—but it makes you think, doesn’t it? What would the world be like if it were actually true? If civilisation were left in female hands, would we live in a utopia free from violence, rape and urine-spattered toilet seats? Or would we, as feminist academic Camille Paglia once cruelly suggested, still be living in grass huts?

It’s an intriguing thought experiment, and one that many feminists have been doing for decades. What if men invented patriarchy because they were jealous of the amazing societies women had created? What if a female-led society wouldn’t actually dissolve in a fit of bitching and hissy fits?

The idea of girls running the world might make for catchy R&B numbers and amusing listicles in Buzzfeed, but this relentless self-adulation speaks not only to the insecurity of the modern feminist movement, but to something more sinister. Since the 1970s, misandry has been easing its way into the cultural mainstream, driven by a small but vocal clique of militant third-wave feminists. Unhappy with the reality of living as respected equals in the new society gifted to them by first- and second-wave feminism, these radicals have embarked on a mission to dismantle society as a whole. Why? Because society was built by men, and is therefore somehow intrinsically rotten.

According to this worldview, society's ills can be traced back to the ground zero of human depravity: something called “toxic masculinity”. In order to save society from itself, human civilisation must be cleansed of masculinity. Does that mean the elimination of men? For some of them—lesbians are strongly represented among third-wave feminist ranks—the answer may be yes. Others, however, believe “genocide” is the sort of masculine pursuit that got us all into trouble in the first place.

Step one of the feminist plan to rescue civilisation has been to convince everyone else that gender is an arbitrary construct. In defiance of biological science (a field dominated by men and thus of course steeped in patriarchal dogma) feminists have decided that gender was cooked up by the patriarchy to justify violence against women. Amazingly, they've been quite successful: most people accept the sex-gender distinction uncritically.

Second, feminists want to undermine men and engineer masculinity out of society in favour of feminine virtues such as gentleness, empathy and ruthless backstabbing. And it’s here things get ugly. Almost one in five boys in the US have been neutered with drugs like Adderall and Ritalin to control their hyperactivity and impulsiveness. Schools are banning games like “tag.” Woe betide any boy who chews pastry into the shape of a gun.

Efforts to micromanage masculinity out of boys reach ludicrous heights in places where women are most “equal” in society. In Sweden, the advertising regulator has been reprimanding toy stores for producing inappropriate catalogues that dare to suggest that girls might like to play with dolls, and has offered “training and guidance” on how to market Barbie to boys.

We know that most boys prefer playing with lego and most girls prefer playing with dolls. Science knows it too: in a famous experiment at Cambridge University, one-day-old male infants were observed to be more likely to look at a mechanical mobile suspended above them than a human face; female infants behaved in the opposite way.

Men enter university to find that expressions of masculinity are not only offensive to women, but apparently contribute to an environment in which women feel unsafe. The display of any remotely boyish behaviour is chastised as “lad culture,” and, when the puritanical feminists can get away with it, punished for promoting “rape culture”.

The claims made by campus warriors about the perverse nature of masculinity are so ludicrous it can be hard to separate fact from satire. Last week, the president of the Cambridge Union suggested that the matching ties worn by some university drinking societies “normalise and institutionalise rape culture”.

Despite the best efforts of zealots to make their daughters play with fire engines and to ban Robin Thicke from the airwaves, business and politics is still dominated by men. This failure to reprogramme men has led to step two of the girl power manifesto; remove men from positions of power and influence by force. The preferred tool for this war on men? Emotional manipulation.

In order to give their case credence, the entirety of human oppression has been recruited to their cause. Men aren’t in positions of privilege and power because patriarchy has gifted them a free pass, but because of an even bigger overarching system that is oppressing women and ethnic minorities and gays and disabled and transgendered people. Especially transgendered people. It’s something the feminist Bell Hooks calls the “white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy”. You will notice it’s only white men who need booting out of their computer science jobs.

The victimhood and whining is working. Barely a week goes by without a commentator in the media bemoaning the lack of women in the upper echelons of the workplace. And by the workplace, they mean cosy bourgeois office jobs, not agriculture, construction or driving trucks. Since 2002, listed companies in Norway have been obliged to meet a forty per cent quota for female directors, a myopic policy that has given rise to the “golden skirts” phenomenon. A small cabal of around 70 suitably qualified women hold multiple directorships; at one time, the most in-demand token woman, Mimi Berdal, sat on 90 boards.

In spite of Norway’s unimpressive track record, Spain and the Netherlands have passed similar laws, Germany has just announced that it will join them and the European Commision is considering imposing the practice across the continent.

Efforts to atone for the sins of the white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal monsters seem to have no end. Despite the glass ceiling no longer existing in British politics, the Labour party has introduced all-women shortlists, a system that bans their male members from running for office in certain constituencies. This illiberal and anti-democratic policy of over-promotion has unsurprisingly not been the greatest success, both delivering voters sub-par candidates, ruining the careers of talented young women and holding men back.

The most notorious of Labour’s failed shortlist candidates, was the hapless Jacqui Smith whose inexplicable promotion gave the UK its most inept Home Secretary in living memory. After leaving the Cabinet she gave a candid interview in which she confessed that while she hoped she had done a good job ”it was more by luck than by any kind of development of skills.” She also bemoaned her “lack of training” for the position of power she was given.

Every cult needs a creation myth and third-wave feminists have a corker of a genesis story that puts Scientology to shame. You see, if men invented patriarchal social norms in order to suppress women, there has to have been a time before the system was invented: a garden of Eden where men didn’t bat an eye at low cut tops and women, unencumbered by societal norms, hunted lions with their bare hands while palming off nappy duties to one of their husbands.

The idea that mystical ancients governed themselves based on feminine principles has propelled much of the anti-patriarchy movement. The doctrine started in the 1860s when Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen argued that early societies were governed by women and maternal love was the glue that held civilisation together. These early people lived in harmony with nature and the universe until men seized control from women and asserted their domination.

The idea snowballed. In her 1930 book Mothers and Amazons, a self described “first feminine history of culture”, the Austrian intellectual Bertha Eckstein-Diener popularised the notion that all societies were matriarchal until they were overthrown and poisoned by the patriarchy. She was capitalising on the rot that had set in a few decades earlier when when Friedrich Engels, in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State used the matriarchal myth to justify the overthrow of society. He proposed that before capitalism women dominated men, but as men acquire material goods they needed to created a system that allowed them to pass wealth on. Thus patriarchy, the subjugation of women, capitalism, greed and individualism.

Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the claim that men seized control of the family for their own malevolent ends, is that it is completely at odds with reality. I mean, just ask any husband who really rules the roost in their house. Patriarchy’s genius is that it divides social responsibility along biologically defined lines. Of course there are plenty of exceptions that prove rules, but the differences between men and women are real, and rooted in biological fact.

At this point it’s probably worth defining what patriarchy is and how it relates to masculinity. Patriarchy seeks to produce and protect children by assigning roles to men and women. Women look after the children, men provide for the family. For much of history this may have sucked a bit for the minority who didn’t conform to gender norms: women who hate children and men who like playing house. But, in terms of human survival, it served us pretty well.

What patriarchy has never been is a system for oppressing women. Many men throughout history would have happily had sex with a woman, then disappeared off without providing support or protection if society had let them get away with it. Patriarchy is a form of social control that suppresses men’s sexual instinct for the good of society and keeps them around to look after the kids. It certainly doesn’t act in men’s unfettered self-interest.

In recent years, studies by scientists such as Professor Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge have proved what we already know: women are more adept at empathy and boys are better at systematising. That is to say, that the male brain is better at understanding how a system works and thus how a system can be controlled or improved. Men’s brains are the perfect tool for battling and overcoming the natural world, for example to build cities or aircraft or ships.

The second difference is men come with a greater variance in intelligence. In effect, this means men are more likely to be air-headed simpletons or sublime geniuses, whereas women tend towards the mean.

The final defining difference between men and women is more abstract. Women tend to have less difficulty making peace with their place in the world, while a man's sense of purpose is often more fraught. Men can find contentment harder to achieve. There’s an innate desire in men to prove one’s worth, to overcome the natural order, to achieve and to satisfy the ego. It’s what people mean when they say men are competitive: boys have an innate desire to win.

That desire to control, a greater propensity towards extreme intelligence and an obsessive compulsion to prove oneself are at the root of both the vilest crimes and greatest achievements of the male species. To again quote Camille Paglia, “there is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”

The feminists are right about one thing. It’s a great privilege to be a white man. We have liberated humankind from the drudgery of agrarian subsistence and built a world where individual liberty can take precedence over all else. The patriarchal masculinity that today's feminists are trying to squeeze out of boys is responsible for the appliances that ended domestic drudgery, devised the economic and philosophical frameworks that bestow freedom on women to self determine their own lives and created the birth control pill, freeing women from nature’s animal cycle and from their obligation to keep their side of the patriarchal bargain.

Friday, December 12, 2014

I picked this up from the poster "MV" at Dalrock's. I started smiling. It's a perfect recap of a very disturbed woman who fooled liberal loons, who want to be fooled because they are not interested in the facts, just their agenda.

"1) Jackie falls in crush with Randall.
"2) Randall LJBFs Jackie
"3) Jackie doesn’t understand that “no means no”
"4) Jackie invents an imaginary boyfriend 'chem guy,' complete with fake photos and phone number
"5) Jackie boasts with chem guy in front of Randall to make him jealous. She even gives “chem guy’s phone number” to Randall, Andy and Cindy and, impersonating chem guy, insinuates to Randall that she loves him.
"6) Randall remains unimpressed.
"7) Jackie goes to date with chem guy.
"8) Few hours later Jackie gives Randall a 'damsel in distress' call.
"9) Randall arrives and she hysterically tells him that chem guy lured her into a gang rape of clinton-levinsky variety.
"10) Instead of falling in love with her, Randall calls reinforcements: Andy and Cindy.
"11) They try to console her and convince her to go to police, but she refuses.
"12) After that night chem guy still sends texts to Randall singing praise to Jackie.
"13) Randall still doesn’t want to fall in love with Jackie.
"14) Jackie is heartbroken and gets depressed.
"15) Jackie finds out campus anti-rape activists and activities. Here she get attention, she didn’t get from Randall.
"16) In next two years Jackie gets obsessed with anti-rape activism. Her story of that night gets newer and newer juicy details.
"17) Two years later, Rolling Stone femipropagandist Sabrina Rubin Ederly is combing campuses nationwide to find THE perfect person for 'campus rape culture awareness poster girl'.
"18) Jackie and Sabrina meet.
"19) Sabrina interviews Jackie, is too impressed to check the facts and runs the story to the printing presses.
"20) Zombie apocalypse breaks out.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

The Sexodus, Part 1: The Men Giving Up On Women And Checking Out Of Society

Sexual dysfunction is not unique to the twenty-first century—nor, certainly, to the West. Japan's "herbivores"—men who shun sex and prefer saving money and going on long walks to riding motorcycles and flirting with girls—have been well documented and are regarded by social scientists as the best example of male sexuality turning in on itself.

But although the sexodus, a new retreat into solitude by Western males, has a different flavour to it and dramatically different aetiology from previously observed social crises, many characteristics are identical. And what's troubling about men throwing in the towel in both East and West is the rapidity with which the malaise is spreading across entire generations, fuelled not just by sexual dissatisfaction but also the economic and educational pressures felt by so many young boys.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. It's little wonder that in the disorientating modern world, men should seek out extreme measures to help them relate to, and gebrt what they want from, the opposite sex. That probably explains the rise of Julien Blanc, who claims his seminars can transform the way women will respond to you. Blanc is at the extreme end of a movement known as "pick-up artists" or PUAs.

But other voices in the PUA or "red pill" movements, including Daryush Valizadeh, who goes by the pen name Roosh V, says there are structural reasons why society is evolving away from inter-gender contentment. Part of the problem is unrealistic female expectations, says Valizadeh. "Getting laid with attractive women has become extremely hard for average men. Women today of average or even below average quality desire an elite man with above-average looks, muscles, intelligence, and confidence.

"If an average girl works hard enough, she will be able to have a one-night stand with a 'hot' guy every now and then because he happened to be horny and wanted an easy lay. The girl then thinks that she actually can get such a man to commit to her for the long term, and so doesn't give the average guys a chance, holding out for the type of stud that she had a brief sexual encounter with in the past."

Valizadeh has some controversial views on the state of modern womanhood, too. He says: "It's also damaging that the attractiveness of women is rapidly declining, mainly due to the obesity epidemic. No matter what members of the 'fat acceptance' movement say, men have an innate need for fit women. What happens is the few attractive girls left get unimaginable amounts of attention."

According to Valizadeh, today's sexual marketplace represents a Pareto distribution in which "20 percent of the top guys have access to 80 percent of the best women," which has the effect of leaving women holding out for the perfect man, a man who of course never comes.

Valizadeh agrees with masculinity author Jack Donovan that men have been feminised by a culture that rejects and ridicules male characteristics and habits. "Good luck naming one male role model that men have today that actually helps them become men," he remarks. These thoughts are echoed on occasionally rude but compelling male-oriented blogs, such as the phenomenally popular Chateau Heartiste.

They are also supported by the current state of the sex wars, which are constituted bizarrely. One of the remarkable things about recent high-profile skirmishes with feminists is how few mainstream heterosexual men have been involved. In the GamerGate video games controversy, opposition to "social justice warriors" and their attempts at censorship on Twitter has come from older gay men in public life and younger geeks, gamers and drop-outs; in the case of Matt Taylor, it was geeks and other women.

Straight young men simply don't want to know any more. They're not getting involved. Some women, too, horrified by what lesbianised third-wave feminism claims to do in their name, opt out of the argument. The absurd result is that geeks, queers and dykes are dominating the discussion about how men and women should interact. Jack Donovan, for example, is gay, as is your present correspondent. It's as if gays are the only men left prepared to fight masculinity's corner.

Men want normal relationships that include sex, says Valizadeh. Some of them will read pick-up artist books or go to seminars by people such as Roosh V if they don't get it or need to be trained out of "white knight" behaviours instilled in them by a female-dominated culture. (Men have been taught that being a nice guy gets you laid. It doesn't.)

What strikes a lot of women as strange is how rational and systematic so much of this decision-making is by men. Many young men literally perform a cost-benefit analysis and decide that women aren't worth the hassle. It's girls who lose out in this scenario: men don't need the sustained emotional intimacy that comes with a fulfilling sexual relationship and can retreat into masturbatory pursuits, prostitution and one-night stands much more comfortably.

But that's exactly what it is, from a male point of view: a rational opting out from education, work and marriage by men who have had enough, as a remarkable book by Dr Helen Smith called Men on Strike warned in July last year. (The consensus on this stuff is growing rapidly.)

Men, driven, as many of them like to say, by fact and not emotion, can see that society is not fair to them and more dangerous for them. They point to the fact that they are more likely to be murder victims and more likely to commit suicide. Women do not choose to serve in the Armed Forces and they experience fewer deaths and injuries in the line of work generally.

Women get shorter custodial sentences for the same crimes. There are more scholarships available to them in college. They receive better and cheaper healthcare, and can pick from favourable insurance packages available only to girls. When it comes to children, women are presumed to be the primary caregiver and given preferential treatment by the courts. They have more, better contraceptive options.

Women are less likely to be homeless, unemployed or to abuse drugs than men. They are less likely to be depressed or to suffer from mental illness. There is less pressure on them to achieve financial success. They are less likely to live in poverty. They are given priority by emergency and medical services.

Some might call these statistical trends "female privilege." Yet everywhere and at all times, say men's rights advocates, the "lived experiences" and perceived oppression of women is given a hundred per cent of the airtime, in defiance of the reality that women haven't just achieved parity with men but have overtaken them in almost every conceivable respect. What inequalities remain are the result of women's choices, say respectable feminist academics such as Christina Hoff Sommers, not structural biases.

And yet men are constantly beaten up over bizarre invented concepts such as rape culture and patriarchal privilege. The bizarre but inevitable conclusion of all this is that women are fuelling their own unhappiness by driving men to consider them as sex objects and nothing more, because the thought of engaging in a relationship with a woman is horrifying, or too exhausting to contemplate. And the sexodus will affect women disproportionately harshly because research data show that when women "act like men" by having lots of casual sex, they become unhappy, are more likely to suffer from depression and destroy their chances of securing a meaningful long-term relationship.

It's not just video games and casual sex that young men are retreating into. They are also immersing themselves in fetishes that to their grandparents' generation would resemble grounds for incarceration, and which drive them further away from the formerly fairer sex. Consider, for example, the example of furry culture and anthropomorphic animal sex fetishism, both of which are experiencing explosive growth, fuelled by the internet.

Jack Rivlin's student newspaper The Tab, which we encountered in part one, has noticed the trend spreading on UK campuses. (It's already rife throughout the US.) Other alternative sexual behaviours, including homosexuality and transgenderism, are more prevalent on campus now too.

"It's eminently plausible that there are a greater number of people who identify as homosexual, bisexual or other sexualities who are happy to be labelled as such these days," agrees Cambridge Union president Tim Squirrell, from whom we heard in part one, speaking about the students he sees passing through his Union. "I think we're becoming more open and accepting of people who live different kinds of lifestyles and have different kinds of identities."

Gay emancipation, of course, may not have been a uniformly good thing for women. Depending on whose figures you believe—and you're wise not to take the claims of gay advocacy groups or gay magazines too seriously, for obvious reasons—somewhere between 1 per cent and 10 per cent of the adult male population is gay. (It's probably a lot closer to 1 per cent.)

Just a few decades ago, many of those men—at the risk of stereotyping, the most sensitive, artistic, attractive and highest-earning men; that is, perfect husband material—would have got married, had a few kids and led a double life to pursue their forbidden urges. They wouldn't have bothered their wives for sex and they would have made great fathers.

But now they're settling down with men, in many cases not having children at all. In other words, a healthy chunk of the most desirable men—men who no doubt would have cooed along approvingly to feminist exhortations—are now off the market, leaving even fewer eligible men in the dating pool.

(As a side note, here's an argument you won't read elsewhere: gay men test significantly higher, on average, for IQ, and we know that IQ is at least partially genetically determined. Gays don't reproduce as much now they don't have to keep up the pretence of straight relationships. In fact, surveys say they barely reproduce at all.

Is it too much of a stretch to ask whether society's newfound tolerance of homosexuals has made society... well, a bit more stupid? Granted, it sounds far-fetched. But while there's no doubt that liberating gay men from the shame of their secret double lives has been a moral imperative, driven by compassion, no rapid social change comes without trade-offs.)

All this comes before we even discuss the rapid growth of sadomasochistic sex among the young and the "new civil rights frontier" of transgenderism, a psychiatric disorder currently in the process of being repackaged by the Left as an alternative sexual lifestyle.

The response to part one of this series was colossal. To date, over 300,000 readers have shared it on Facebook. 16,500 readers left comments. Over 500 men wrote to me privately to express their gratitude and support, from every continent and in all age groups. The younger men spoke especially movingly. (Predictably, hundreds of angry feminists on Twitter scorned it as "entitled whinging from white male manbabies," rather proving the point of the story's premise for me.) Here are the most representative quotes from my conversations, reprinted with permission.

Mark, 24: "Everyone I know feels the same. Your article spoke directly to us. We're not all losers and nerds, we're just normal guys who are either scared of being accused of terrible stuff by harpies or simply can't be bothered any more. I can't believe I'm saying this but I just can't deal with hassle of women any more."

Mickey: "I say no to the whole thing, even though I am very heterosexual and would like the intimacy of a relationship based on mutual respect. Well, I thought I did, but it’s been so long and the standard of behavior for women remains so low, along with my tolerance for dating bullshit, that it does not look like a realistic desire anymore."

Francis, 28: "I'm an athlete. My parents have a lot of money. I have plenty of friends and a good social life. I don't hang out with women any more. Occasionally I'll have one night stands, but mostly I fill my time with other things. I got accused of molesting a girl at college and since then I've just thought, whatever. I play sports instead."

Tilo, 20: "I don't know for sure but your article sounds like me and a lot of my friends. I do furry stuff online in secret. I'd be horrified if my parents found out but it's all that gets me off. Girls are a nightmare. I have a brother who's ten years older and he feels the same. We've given up."

Hector, 26: "I did stick to that social belief for a brief time thinking that the need for a serious relationship would come with the age, but it never happened and slowly I gave up. Today, a few hours before reading your article, I was having lunch with my mother and she kept talking about girlfriends and how I needed to get married, meanwhile I kept thinking 'why would I waste my life with this shit?', and it wasn't until I read your article a few hours later, that I realised. And I don't think it's just my generation that is affected by this."

We can be quite sure now that the sexodus is not some fringe, isolated internet movement as "Men Going Their Own Way" has sometimes been characterised. A combination of disastrous social engineering, special privileges for women, the relentless mockery of white men on the basis of their sex and skin colour and the economic and educational abandonment for boys has created one, if not two, lost generations already.

Men created most of what is good about the world. The excesses of masculinity are also, to be sure, responsible for much of what is bad. But if we are to avoid sliding into decline, mediocrity and a world in which men are actively discriminated against, we must arrest the decline in social attitudes towards them before so many victims are claimed that all hope of reconciliation between the sexes is lost. If that happens, it will be women who will suffer.

Monday, December 8, 2014

I hereby declare myself King of America. And all my new subjects had better take me seriously, otherwise I’ll quit and let the Democrats and Republicans back into power. And no one in his or her right mind wants that, right? Personally, I’d rather get a nice paper-cut on my lip with some lemon juice poured on it.

As both the late Catholic anarchist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, have noted, a constitutional monarchy is far superior to any other form of government (it’s not perfect; it’s just the least of all the evils. No, that’s not true; the least evil would be no State at all, but I have serious doubts about that ever happening.)

Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote the relationship between a monarch and his citizens is much like that between fathers and children, and Hoppe has made persuasive arguments that since kings in a sense "own" the country, they’ll take better long-term care of it than a democracy, which invariably looks no further than the next election.

Kuehnelt-Leddihn, quoting Rivarol, had this to say about the difference between monarchy and democracy, "...a monarch can be a Nero or a Marcus Aurelius, the people collectively can be a Nero, but they can never, ever, be a Marcus Aurelius" (my view is that the population may expand, but intelligence is a constant). He also wrote, in Leftism Revisited, "Outside of Switzerland, there has never been a republic that did not become a monarchy. Only the ignorant, the insular, or provincial can consider a republic or democracy – both antique forms of government – ‘modern,’ or a monarchy ‘obsolete.’"

Hoppe writes this about democracy: " ...democracy has been the fountainhead of every form of socialism: of (European) democratic socialism and (American) liberalism and neo-conservatism as well as of international (Soviet) socialism, (Italian) fascism, and national (Nazi) socialism."

He has this to say about monarchs: "...a king, because he ‘owns’ the monopoly [the country] and may sell or bequeath it, will care about the repercussions of his actions on capital values. As the owner of the capital stock on ‘his’ territory, the king will be comparatively future-oriented. In order to preserve or enhance the value of his property, he will exploit only moderately and calculatingly. In contrast, a temporary and interchangeable democratic caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his advantage. He owns its current use but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. Instead, it makes exploitation shortsighted (present-oriented) and uncalculated, i.e., carried out without regard for the value of the capital stock."

Concerning the lying weasels who run democratic governments, he writes, "the selection of government rulers by means of popular elections makes it essentially impossible for a harmless or decent person to ever rise to the top. Presidents and prime ministers come into their position as a result of their efficiency as morally uninhibited demagogues. Hence, democracy virtually assures that only dangerous men will rise to the top of government."

Friedrich Hayek noticed the same thing in chapter ten ("Why the Worst Get on Top") in his 1944 masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom, when he wrote that "the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful" in any society that sees government as the answer to society’s problems. "Seeing the government as the answer to society’s problems" is one of the best one-sentence definitions of democracy I’ve run across.

Unfortunately, democracy is the worst form of government there is. One hundred million to two hundred million people were sacrificed in the "Age of Democracy" known as the 20th century.

If you’ll look at history, you’ll find that King George III’s abuses of the American colonies were but a small fraction of what the – yech, blech, I can barely bring myself to say it – "federal" government does to the citizens today. We’d be far better off if the entire modern Black Thing just disappeared and George, as loopy as he was, was still king.

My first action will to be to close down most of the government. Since the average serf – I mean American – is paying about 40% of his or her income to the government, out goes the IRS. No more tax-forms! People will pay no more than two percent of their income to the government.

Department of "Education" – gone! All public schools are immediately closed down. All schools are now private. No more special interest groups mauling each other, trying by the force of law to impose their curriculum on students. Unfortunately, I’ll have to be a little harsh here and fire every leftist in every college. And every economics, history, law and political-science professor who doesn’t teach anything but the free market and political liberty.

Since all government will be a fraction of its current size, most judges can hit the streets and get honest jobs, instead of transferring citizen’s wealth into the State’s pocket (Thomas Hobbes correctly noted, "Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money").

Any lawyer or judge who doesn’t understand the concept of Natural Law (what used to be called "the common law"), and doesn’t realize that law is discovered and not invented, is obviously unfit for the profession.

Department of Energy – poof! The mud flats in Alaska are now open to exploration. And anywhere else in this country. If anyone is worried about pollution, companies will by law not be allowed to pollute anyone’s property. That’s what the law was supposed to do in the first place, but rarely did. It almost always looked the other way when businesses polluted people’s property. Said it was to protect people’s jobs, which were more important than other people's private property (never mind the fact that without private property there are very few jobs).

All the troops we have in 144 countries – home they come! All political connections with other countries are now severed. If private businesses want to trade with foreign countries, fine. No more foreign aid, which almost always goes to the rulers anyway. Which they then used to oppress and murder their own impoverished citizens.

All welfare is immediately ended. That doesn't mean the "poor" but it does mean the lazy. Most especially it means the corporate pigs sticking their snouts into the public trough. All the private charities that will spring up to make the lazy support themselves. No more subsidizing unmarried teenage girls to pop fatherless babies onto the public dole. If they can’t support them, then open the orphanages back up. They did a fine job in the past.

All gun control laws are now repealed. Anyone can carry a weapon, concealed or unconcealed, in public. If people want to own Tommy guns, wonderful. They’re stupid weapons, anyway. You can’t hit anything with them. Shotguns are much better (machine guns make holes; shotguns make craters, or will even remove your head completely. So guess which one is legal now, and which one isn’t?)

All drug laws are now repealed. No more sending billions to narco-terrorists in foreign countries. No more wasting billions fruitlessly trying to stop drugs from getting into the country.

Obama will immediately be charged with treason and/or war crimes, as will Tom Daschle, Chuck Schumer, Janet Reno, Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger. Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz will never work in any government agency again. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton will be parachuted into Africa. Okay, maybe I’m exceeding my authority, but cut me a little slack, will you? Even kings aren’t perfect.

All illegals are now immediately deported. All Third World immigration is cut off except for the most educated or intelligent (hey, it’s my country, and I want the best, not the worst). Since the Republican and Democratic Party no longer exists, they can’t attempt to import the entire Third World into the U.S. in order to keep themselves in power, even if it will turn the entire nation into the Balkans. Not that they ever cared in the slightest.

The airports are completely privatized! No more waiting in lines longer than football fields. No more pathetic – no, worthless!--attempts at security. If passengers and pilots want to carry pistols with frangible ammo onto the plane, that’s up to the airlines.

All anti-discrimination laws are repealed (I’ll have to admit, it was when I watched airport "security" disrespect Americans with blond or red hair and blue or green eyes while Arabs loaded bombs, uh, I mean suitcases, into the luggage compartments of planes, or else inspected carry-ons to make sure weapons were, oops, I mean weren’t, allowed on. Such are the wonders of federal anti-discrimination laws.)

All ridiculous rules and regulations hobbling the free market are now eliminated. The gold standard is reinstated. Inflation will cease to exist. Without inflation, the business cycle will disappear. No more recessions, and certainly no more depressions.

All "federal" lands will become private. I might just give them away (and certainly not to the rich). In fact, all land will be privately owned, and none will be owned by any government. That includes all streets. So the meter dweebs can get real jobs.

As annoying as the liberals and fascist/socialist war-mongering armchair-general neocons in the media are, I’ll still allow complete freedom of the press. However, since all liberals and necons are wusses, I will cork all of them on the arm and make them cry like girls.

If anyone is abused by what little government is left, he or she can appeal to me directly. And believe me, I’ll almost always favor the citizen. Then I’ll go to the government official and kick him in his rear-end. Just like Eric Cartmann in South Park.

Can anyone imagining any of this happening under any democracy? Nope. Not even in the next 50 years. How about a republic? Fat chance, since Lincoln started the destruction of it. See how great it is to have a King, even if he is a little eccentric?

That’s enough for my first day as King. Then I’ll take a break and act the way royalty is supposed to act: gamble, drink, wear a tux and bow-tie, try to look as mysterious and cool as Sean Connery when he played James Bond, fool around with the royal floozies, and wave to the crowds from my ducal Chevy Cavalier. But first, I have to find a gold cigarette case.

There have been a lot of words written about the University of Virginia Rape-gate scandal over the past two weeks. But the one word which seems to be missing from all the accounts is "sociopath."

Steve Sailer, as usual, had the best take on it, "A Rape Hoax for Book Lovers." He did an excellent job of analyzing in detail how the purported rape victim's story didn't add up. He also touched on the essential dishonesty of a media all too willing to suspend disbelief in the service of political theater.

But Sailer also referred to "Jackie," as the self-styled victim wanted to be known, as "unsettled," a vague word which misses the key point about her personality. She is a pathological liar, ergo, a sociopath. (The only surer sign of sociopathy is serial killing.) And while sociopaths may unsettle other people, they rarely suffer from nerves themselves. (It actually takes a lot of nerve to run with a huge lie the way Jackie did.)

Jackie was described in other accounts as "troubled" and "unhappy," which also miss the point. Sociopaths trouble others, but generally don't suffer from self-doubt themselves. And "unsatisfied" is a better description of a sociopath than "unhappy." A sociopath always wants more: more fame, more admiration, and more sympathy.

It was this last desire which motivated this entire charade. Jackie has Munchausen's Syndrome, whose "sufferers" (sociopaths all) invent various maladies in order to quench their bottomless need for sympathy and affection. But instead of inventing an illness in order to gain attention and sympathy from doctors and nurses and friends, Jackie invented a rape in order to gain attention and sympathy from her friends and the UVA dean and other actual rape victims in the campus support group she joined.

She even tried to get sympathy from Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and by extension, her readership. It was that national exposure which ultimately proved her undoing.

A non-sociopath would simply never try to perpetrate such a hoax. Try to imagine yourself doing what Jackie did. First, you tell your friends that you were raped by nine guys. Then, you go to the dean of the university and report your "rape" to her. Then, you tell a reporter from a national newsmagazine about it.

These actions require a level of shamelessness that goes far beyond what a nonsociopath is capable of. They also require the confidence that you can always fool other people with your lies, a confidence only sociopaths seem to have.

The only other alternative here is that Jackie is somehow psychotic. But her actions reek of dishonesty, not insanity. She can't even be that dumb, either: it's hard to get into the University of Virginia. (Of course, as a sociopath, Jackie must have gamed the system as much as possible: cunning often trumps IQ.)

Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of the original Rolling Stone article, is not a sociopath herself. If she were, she'd have seen through Jackie. (In fact, if she'd had any extensive firsthand experience with sociopaths, she'd have seen through Jackie.) But Erdely is dumb, and also slightly dishonest, in that peculiar way that so many liberals are. She wanted so badly to believe that this rape took place, and she wanted so badly to believe that all those WASPy frat boys were capable of such evil, that she never looked critically at the "victim." And, she never bothered to let the accused speak.

When the Rolling Stone article first appeared, the usual people saw this as a great opportunity to "raise awareness" of campus rape. But the only thing this incident should raise awareness of is sociopathy. Unfortunately, that angle will undoubtedly be lost amid all back and forth about feminism and politics and the media.

So far Jackie's real name hasn't been given, a courtesy traditionally extended by the press to all rape victims. But should that courtesy be extended to those who make false rape accusations?

Personally, I'm curious to find out more about Jackie. What were her parents like? Was she adopted? What was her childhood like? What other lies has she told?

I'm not sure what the appropriate penalty is for Jackie. She never tried to get those fraternity brothers sent to jail (she never filed charges with the police), so perhaps a jail sentence is not appropriate. But, she did name some of her "rapists," to the dean and others. So her real name should be made public.

And, if justice is served, this story will hound her for the rest of her life.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Common sense, yes. Which leftists, being narcissists, don't have. What possesses them instead is hubris, hate and envy.

By the way, the somewhat eccentric poet William Blake was utterly opposed to the "blank slate" hypothesis, hundreds of years ago. It wasn't new with Pinker.

The Dark Enlightenment for Newbies

Soon after Nick Land coined the phrase “Dark Enlightenment” there was a flood of articles on the subject. However, most of the articles that actually tried to explain what it was were written by those hostile to the concept. Now that the furor has subsided it seems like a good time to try to explain to newcomers what the Dark Enlightenment actually is from a sympathetic angle. With so many different writers it can be intimidating for newcomers to tip their toes in the water without having to jump in to the ocean. So this will be a primer for those who are perhaps curious and looking for an introduction.

In Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment series he never actually defines it, so I am going to go by Jim’s description: that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.

Claiming that the enlightenment was optimistic about human nature is nothing new. In fact, much of the enlightenment itself was dedicated to this. Just think of Locke’s skepticism about innate ideas, Hume’s denial of knowledge of the self, or Kant’s denial of knowledge of things-in-themselves. This skepticism concerning knowledge was carried to its completion in the 20th century with Sellers’ denial that we possess direct awareness of our perpetual states, and reached it apex with Millikan’s attack on “meaning rationalism,” with the conclusion that even the meanings of our own thoughts and language are not directly given to consciousness.

So what is the enlightenment view of human nature against which the Dark Enlightenment sets itself? Here we seem to have pretty strong agreement that it is the blank slate view of human nature that is not only wrong but disastrously so. (Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is required reading for anyone delving into these waters.) The blank slate was originally an entirely epistemological notion; it was the claim that knowledge came from the senses and that there were no innate ideas in Descartes’ sense. Restricted to this sphere it was relatively unproblematic and it is a view I share. But in the late 19th and 20th century the notion of the blank slate was extended way beyond its merely epistemological origins to encompass the entirety of human psychology. It is this expansion that the Dark Enlightenment sets itself.

In it illuminating to understand how communism claimed it was the rational conclusion of the blank slate. Communism held that human nature is entirely malleable and that education and propaganda can shape people in any way desired. Communists held that people were so malleable that, say, parents’ affection for their children could be educated away and children could be happily abandoned to be brought up by the state, or that people’s self-interest could be overcome through education, and so people could work not for their own interests but for the benefit of the state, or that people could be educated out of their desire for material goods, and so on. The communist views were actually quite reasonable given blank slate equalism. For example, I seem remember reading somewhere that Trotsky claimed that there would be a Leonardo Da Vinci on every street corner after the revolution, and why not? If everyone is equal then inequality must be the result of social conditions. If there could be one Leonardo Da Vinci why can’t everyone be a Leonardo Da Vinci if we are all equal and society is perfected?

The official socially-approved lesson from the fall of communism is that it fell because it failed to see that people are naturally self-interested. Even uber-Lefty Peter Singer in his book Darwinian Left concedes that a political system can not require that people act against their self-interest. This is the view of the neo-liberalism that has reigned for the last 30 years: blank slate + self-interest. Neo-liberals of the right and left generally believe in the blank slate in all areas except that people are naturally materially self-interested.

The Dark Enlightenment puts a lot more back into the self in addition to self-interest. The reason for this is that the DE sees psychology as a branch of biology. I won’t argue for this point here except to claim that if minds are the result of the functioning of our brains, and brains are biological organs, they must work under the same principles as the rest of biology. This actually could work as a definition of the Dark Enlightenment: biology applies to people too. Which might be rephrased as: realize that you are a designed being. For example, one thing we put back into human nature is biofunctional psychology, the view that mental states must be understood the way any other biological process in understood. Take the feeling of hunger. What effect does hunger produce that might explain how it contributes to the well-being of an organism? It seems clear that hunger is supposed to, is designed to, get the organism to procure food. This is the function of hunger just as it is the function of the heart to pump blood, or red blood cells to carry oxygen to the body. The same account can be given of other feelings like thirst, fear, anger, and other mental states like beliefs, hopes, intentions, and desires.

A parent’s greater affection for their children than for unrelated children is another thing we put into human nature. We generally use the theory of kin-selection to explain this. To reinterate, it used to be thought by communism (and in the Israeli kibbutz as well) that children could be brought up communally, without attachment to their parents, and that parents could happily surrender their children to be raised by the state, and that children could thus come to care for the state more than for their families. But wherever this is tried parents come to reject it and desire to look after their children’s welfare personally. The Dark Enlightenment sees a parent’s love and partiality for their children as part of human nature.

Another thing we put back into the self is sexual attraction. It might surprise some today to know that it used to be believed that sexual attraction and identity was purely a matter of social conditioning. It was thought that if a boy was raised as a girl from childbirth, he would go on to identify as a girl, and be attracted to boys, and display other feminine traits. Here is a documentary that looks at this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiJVJ5QRRUE

This view has proven to be entirely unfounded, yet you can see how it follows from the extreme blank slate dogma. But if psychology is understood biologically, it totally makes sense that sexual attraction would be built into humans just as it is in other animals.

Another thing we put into human nature is diversity. In the biological world, everything from the length of ones big toe, how fast you can run, the number of hair you have, and so on, is distributed along a range of values. This should apply to psychological states as well. Some people might be natural hot heads who have stronger feelings of anger, the highly intelligent kids in your school probably were actually smarter that the slower kids, some people might have a natural talent for music, and so on.

So what is dark about the Dark Enlightenment? Absolutely nothing. The Dark Enlightenment only looks dark in contrast to the blinding (as in, it blinds you) optimism of flash in the pan of blank slate equalism. The things that the DE contend about human nature–that parents naturally favor their children, that sexual attraction is a biological phenomenon, that some people are naturally smarter than others–were all accepted as common sense for most or all of human history. It is the unrealistic utopianism of modern liberalism which is ridiculously absurd. The Dark Enlightenment might be better termed The Return to Normalcy. So the phrase “Dark Enlightenment” might not be the best, but it has received enough attention that I don’t think we should abandon it.

Each aspect of human nature I have discussed here has its own branch of the Dark Enlightenment tree (and its own websites dedicated to its discussion). Having accepted Jim’s definition at the outset of this post, I now wish to reject is as too limiting. The Dark Enlightenment extends far beyond the account of human psychology discussed here. For example, I haven’t discussed politics or religion (or gnon). Elsewhere ( https://darwinianreactionary.wordpress.com/2013/12/27/teleology-and-the-dark-enlightenment/ ) I have argued that the Dark Enlightenment should be identified with a revival of the relevance of teleology. These are all fertile areas for exploration for anyone interested in these
topics.

Darwinism is dead and has been dead a long time. But as Arthur C. Clarke once noted, scientists and lay people who won't change their minds will have to die off before they stop obstructing the more open-minded. Such obstructionists prevent advancement.

It was the Russians who first originated the theory of which Margulis speaks.

(As an aside, American women are the most pampered and self-pitying in the world...and they know nothing of Grace Hopper or Lynn Margulis.)

This interview is from Discover magazine. It is the first of three parts. Click on the link for the rest.

It was written by Dick Teresi.

It's the neo-Darwinists, population geneticists, AIDS researchers, and English-speaking biologists as a whole who have it all wrong

A conversation with Lynn Margulis is an effective way to change the way you think about life. Not just your life. All life. Scientists today recognize five groups of life: bacteria, protoctists (amoebas, seaweed), fungi (yeast, mold, mushrooms), plants, and animals. Margulis, a self-described “evolutionist,” makes a convincing case that there are really just two groups, bacteria and everything else.

That distinction led to her career-making insight. In a 1967 paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Margulis suggested that mitochondria and plastids—vital structures within animal and plant cells—evolved from bacteria hundreds of million of years ago, after bacterial cells started to collect in interactive communities and live symbiotically with one another. The resulting mergers yielded the compound cells known as eukaryotes, which in turn gave rise to all the rest—the protoctists, fungi, plants, and animals, including humans. The notion that we are all the children of bacteria seemed outlandish at the time, but it is now widely supported and accepted. “The evolution of the eukaryotic cells was the single most important event in the history of the organic world,” said Ernst Mayr, the leading evolutionary biologist of the last century. “Margulis’s contribution to our understanding the symbiotic factors was of enormous importance.”

Her subsequent ideas remain decidedly more controversial. Margulis came to view symbiosis as the central force behind the evolution of new species, an idea that has been dismissed by modern biologists. The dominant theory of evolution (often called neo-Darwinism) holds that new species arise through the gradual accumulation of random mutations, which are either favored or weeded out by natural selection. To Margulis, random mutation and natural selection are just cogs in the gears of evolution; the big leaps forward result from mergers between different kinds of organisms, what she calls symbiogenesis. Viewing life as one giant network of social connections has set Margulis against the mainstream in other high-profile ways as well. She disputes the current medical understanding of AIDS and considers every kind of life to be “conscious” in a sense.

Margulis herself is a highly social organism. Now 71, she is a well-known sight at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she is on the geosciences faculty, riding her bike in all weather and at all times of day. Interviewer Dick Teresi, a neighbor, almost ran her over when, dressed in a dark coat, she cycled in front of his car late at night. On the three occasions that they met for this interview, Teresi couldn’t help noticing that Margulis shared her home with numerous others: family, students, visiting scholars, friends, friends of friends, and anybody interesting who needed a place to stay.

Most scientists would say there is no controversy over evolution. Why do you disagree?

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred—that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?

And you don’t believe that natural selection is the answer?

This is the issue I have with neo-Darwinists: They teach that what is generating novelty is the accumulation of random mutations in DNA, in a direction set by natural selection. If you want bigger eggs, you keep selecting the hens that are laying the biggest eggs, and you get bigger and bigger eggs. But you also get hens with defective feathers and wobbly legs. Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create.

That seems like a fairly basic objection. How, then, do you think the neo-Darwinist perspective became so entrenched?

In the first half of the 20th century, neo-Darwinism became the name for the people who reconciled the type of gradual evolutionary change described by Charles Darwin with Gregor Mendel’s rules of heredity [which first gained widespread recognition around 1900], in which fixed traits are passed from one generation to the next. The problem was that the laws of genetics showed stasis, not change. If you have pure breeding red flowers and pure breeding white flowers, like carnations, you cross them and you get pink flowers. You back-cross them to the red parent and you could get three-quarters red, one-quarter white. Mendel showed that the grandparent flowers and the offspring flowers could be identical to each other. There was no change through time.

There’s no doubt that Mendel was correct. But Darwinism says that there has been change through time, since all life comes from a common ancestor—something that appeared to be supported when, early in the 20th century, scientists discovered that X-rays and specific chemicals caused mutations. But did the neo- Darwinists﻿ ever go out of their offices? Did they or their modern followers, the population geneticists, ever go look at what’s happening in nature the way Darwin did? Darwin was a fine naturalist. If you really want to study evolution, you’ve got go outside sometime, because you’ll see symbiosis everywhere!

So did Mendel miss something? Was Darwin wrong?

I’d say both are incomplete. The traits that follow Mendel’s laws are trivial. Do you have a widow’s peak or a straight hairline? Do you have hanging earlobes or attached earlobes? Are you female or male? Mendel found seven traits that followed his laws exactly. But neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change—led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

What kind of evidence turned you against neo-Darwinism?

What you’d like to see is a good case for gradual change from one species to another in the field, in the laboratory, or in the fossil record—and preferably in all three. Darwin’s big mystery was why there was no record at all before a specific point [dated to 542 million years ago by modern researchers], and then all of a sudden in the fossil record you get nearly all the major types of animals. The paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould studied lakes in East Africa and on Caribbean islands looking for Darwin’s gradual change from one species of trilobite or snail to another. What they found was lots of back-and-forth variation in the population and then—whoop—a whole new species. There is no gradualism in the fossil record.

Gould used the term “punctuated equilibrium” to describe what he interpreted as actual leaps in evolutionary change. Most biologists disagreed, suggesting a wealth of missing fossil evidence yet to be found. Where do you stand in the debate?

“Punctuated equilibrium” was invented to describe the discontinuity in the appearance of new species, and symbiogenesis supports the idea that these discontinuities are real﻿. An example: Most clams live in deep, fairly dark waters. Among one group of clams is a species whose ancestors ingested algae—a typical food—but failed to digest them and kept the algae under their shells. The shell, with time, became translucent, allowing sunlight in. The clams fed off their captive algae and their habitat expanded into sunlit waters. So there’s a discontinuity between the dark-dwelling, food-gathering ancestor and the descendants that feed themselves photosynthetically.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

The ethologist John B. Calhoun coined the term "behavioral sink" to describe the collapse in behavior which resulted from overcrowding. Over a number of years, Calhoun conducted over-population experiments on rats which culminated in 1962 with the publication of an article in the Scientific American of a study of behavior under conditions of overcrowding. In it, Calhoun coined the term "behavioral sink". Calhoun's work became used as an animal model of societal collapse, and his study has become a touchstone of urban sociology and psychology in general.

In it, Calhoun described the behavior as follows:

“Many [female rats] were unable to carry pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did. An even greater number, after successfully giving birth, fell short in their maternal functions. Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption. [...]

The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioral sink. The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained. As many as 60 of the 80 rats in each experimental population would assemble in one pen during periods of feeding. Individual rats would rarely eat except in the company of other rats. As a result extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations.

[...] In the experiments in which the behavioral sink developed, infant mortality ran as high as 96 percent among the most disoriented groups in the population.”

Calhoun would continue his experiments for many years, but the publication of the 1962 article put the concept in the public domain, where it took root in popular culture as an analogy for human behavior.

Calhoun retired from NIMH in 1984, but continued to work on his research results until his death on September 7, 1995.

Calhoun's early experiments with rats were carried out on farmland at Rockville, Maryland, starting in 1947.

While Calhoun was working at NIMH in 1954, he began numerous experiments with rats and mice. During his first tests, he placed around 32 to 56 rodents in a 10 x 14-foot case in a barn in Montgomery County. He separated the space into four rooms. Every room was specifically created to support a dozen matured brown Norwegian rats. Rats could maneuver between the rooms by using the ramps. Since Calhoun provided unlimited resources, such as water, food, and also protection from predators as well as disease and weather, the rats were said to be in “rat utopia” or “mouse paradise,” another psychologist explained.

Following his earlier experiments with rats, in 1972 Calhoun would later create his "Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice": a 101-inch square cage for mice with food and water replenished to support any increase in population,[8] which took his experimental approach to its limits. In his most famous experiment in the series, "Universe 25", population peaked at 2,200 mice and thereafter exhibited a variety of abnormal, often destructive behaviors. By the 600th day, the population was on its way to extinction.

Influence of the concept

The 1968 Scientific American article came at a time at which overpopulation had become a subject of great public interest, and had a considerable cultural influence.[9] The study was directly referenced in some works of fiction, and may have been an influence on many more.

Calhoun had phrased much of his work in anthropomorphic terms, in a way that made his ideas highly accessible to a lay audience. Tom Wolfe wrote about the concept in his article "Oh Rotten Gotham! Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink", later to be made into the last chapter of The Pump House Gang. Lewis Mumford also referenced Calhoun's work in his The City in History, stating that
“No small part of this ugly barbarization has been due to sheer physical congestion: a diagnosis now partly confirmed with scientific experiments with rats – for when they are placed in equally congested quarters, they exhibit the same symptoms of stress, alienation, hostility, sexual perversion, parental incompetence, and rabid violence that we now find in the Megalopolis.”

Calhoun's work has been referenced in comic books, including Batman and 2000 AD.

Calhoun himself saw the fate of the population of mice as a metaphor for the potential fate of man. He characterized the social breakdown as a “spiritual death”, with reference to bodily death as the “second death” mentioned in the Biblical book of Revelation 2:11.

"Calhoun's work with rats inspired the 1971 children's book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O'Brien, which was adapted into a 1982 animated film, The Secret of NIMH."

Rat to man comparison

Controversy exists over the implications of the experiment. Psychologist Jonathan Freedman's experiment recruited high school and university students to carry out a series of experiments that measured the effects of density on behavior. He measured their stress, discomfort, aggression, competitiveness, and general unpleasantness. He declared to have found no appreciative negative effects in 1975. Researchers argued that "Calhoun’s work was not simply about density in a physical sense, as number of individuals-per-square-unit-area, but was about degrees of social interaction."

For many women—even smart women, women who should know better—a "strong man" is synonymous with one who treats her badly. If the man doesn't treat her badly, she'll mortify herself, often by becoming voracious in her needs. She'll hate herself and then wonder why she's unloved.

Dr. Alexandra Symonds records the case of a woman who "lived alone, worked hard, traveled, and had many friends" and yet was "was always very cautious about becoming involved (romantically) because she knew that ‘only a strong man could take me." Symonds found that as soon as this woman met a man who was compatible, she seemed to change from being independent to being extremely needy.

"She had no interest in going out or entertaining friends. She was interested only in her boyfriend, had tremendous sexual desires, and looked forward to getting married, cutting down on her work or giving it up completely. She clung to her boyfriend physically and emotionally, looked up to him in a little-girl manner and conducted herself in a submissive sycophantic way in his presence." She lost all sense of pride or satisfaction in her work or any area of her life apart from the romantic involvement. The independent woman declared, in effect, that in a relationship she could only behave as someone whose behavior needed a "strong man's" influence. Not only did she give up her independence, but she contrived a situation that was dramatic, tense and laced with stress. Perhaps she felt that only in this way could she be part of a "passion play."

Such a woman might even look for someone who will cause her emotional pain, since she has come to associate pain with her deepest feelings and most intimate relationships (and, in extreme cases, this can spill over into the toleration of physical as well as emotional pain).

Think of the old song "Johnny, Get Angry," in which a girl begs her boyfriend to get angry and get mad, to give her the "biggest lecture" she's ever had. She tells him that she wants a "brave man" and a "cave man," and that by being angry will prove that he "cares, really cares" for her. His anger and her fear of him are seen as "proof" of their love. Conjuring up images of cave men, dragging women around by the hair, the 1950's song is representative of a school of romance that assigns pain as proof of love.

It's not only in pop songs that women seek out men who will cause them emotional grief of who will reject them after a brief affair. Dorothy Parker has been quoted as saying that "I require only three things of a man. He must be handsome, ruthless and stupid." Parker's line is suffused with the sharp edge of irony that characterizes her fiction. This line, however, is from her biography. Just because a woman can vivisect an unhealthy relationship by describing two mismatched characters to perfection, it unfortunately does not guarantee that she will be able to see with such clarity the details of her own intimate relationships.

Parker, who at one point married the same man twice ("There are several people at this wedding who haven't spoken to each other in years," she said at the occasion of her second marriage to Alan Campbell, "Including the bride and the groom"), did not seem to herself have been particularly insightful in choosing men who would treat her well. In fact, she seemed to seek out those who would most obviously devastate her. It is a cliche that a woman is more responsive to a man's forgetfulness than to his attentions, and men have noticed this as well as women.

Oscar Wilde wrote that "I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters all the time." Wilde's flippant statement is no less poignant for its "bitchiness:" He focused on the drive that some women have to find the man who will colonize their emotions, enslave their passions, and rule over their lives—and so in the name of finding love, they find a fascist.

50 Shades of Grey, anyone?

Sylvia Plath, in one of her most moving poems, asserts that "Every woman adores a Fascist," who has the "brute heart" of "a brute like you." Her poem goes on, in painful and careful verse, to describe the "Love of the rack and screw." The play on words is anything but playful; obviously "screw" is as much a word of torture as it is a description of the sexual act. In a similar manner, one of Margaret Atwood's narrators suggests that she and her lover go together like a "hook and eye." Nice, the reader might think, a domestic poem, a woman who still finds her metaphors in the world of needle and thread. Atwood, however, goes on to contextualize the terms, and they are not the comfortable images from a sewing box, but instead drawn from the hunter's arsenal, images of curved steel and pain: Atwood is describing "A fish hook. An open eye." The reader reflexively blinks, and the transition from believing something is a perfect fit to believing it will be the death of you is swift and shocking.

Novelist Margaret Drabble, for one, locates the responsibility for such misplaced desires in the way we are taught to envision "real romance" as tragic. "I blame Campion, I blame the poets," fumes Drabble in The Waterfall, "I blame Shakespeare for that farcical moment in Romeo and Juliet where he sees her at the dance, from far off, and says, I'll have her, because she is the one that will kill me."

When I read that I thought of the high-school gymnasium dance in West Side Story, where Tony and Maria look at each other as everything else blurs. You knew from that first glance that Tony and Maria were as good as in bed and as good as in the grave—sort of coming and going at the same time.

While many women will not actually look for a painful relationship, we might well look for a man who seems to be a little "too good" for us. Women will focus on the man who apparently likes but ignores them rather than devote their attention to the man who likes and is adoring of them. "A man who has all the time in the world for me," says my friend Anne, "just isn't busy enough."

Thomas Hardy suggests that "Women never tire of bewailing man's fickleness in love, but they only seem to snub his constancy." The words still ring true today—ringing up the cash at Amazon, that is.